The question is the thing

• Jim Holt reviews Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember in The London Review of Books.

To ponder:

Moreover, as the cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus has pointed out, it’s possible to have the benefits of contextual memory without the costs. ‘The proof is Google,’ Marcus writes. ‘Search engines start with an underlying substrate of postcode memory (the well-mapped information they can tap into) and build contextual memory on top. The postcode foundation guarantees reliability, while the context on top hints at which memories are most likely needed at a given moment.’ It’s a pity, Marcus adds, that evolution didn’t start with a memory system more like the computer’s.

Considering these advantages, why not outsource as much of our memory as possible to Google? Carr responds with a bit of rhetorical bluster. ‘The web’s connections are not our connections,’ he writes. ‘When we outsource our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect and even our identity.’ Then he quotes William James, who in 1892 in a lecture on memory declared: ‘The connecting is the thinking.’ And James was onto something: the role of memory in thinking, and in creativity. What do we really know about creativity? Very little. We know that creative genius is not the same thing as intelligence. In fact, beyond a certain minimum IQ threshold – about one standard deviation above average, or an IQ of 115 – there is no correlation at all between intelligence and creativity. We know that creativity is empirically correlated with mood-swing disorders. A couple of decades ago, Harvard researchers found that people showing ‘exceptional creativity’ – which they put at fewer than 1 per cent of the population – were more likely to suffer from manic-depression or to be near relatives of manic-depressives. As for the psychological mechanisms behind creative genius, those remain pretty much a mystery. About the only point generally agreed on is that, as Pinker put it, ‘Geniuses are wonks.’ They work hard; they immerse themselves in their genre.

My whole thing? The "exponential" growth of knowledge accessible by the Internet only expands our possibilities. Science and technology are not in perpetual motion; they move forward only when we start asking different questions.

Sooner or later...

• Malcolm Gladwell on creativity in The New Yorker.

...When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The result is one of that string of masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay.) When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.

Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

Opposable thumbs were just a start

• Kenneth M. Heilman and Russell S. Donda examine neuroscience and fundamentalism at Tikkun.

Very interesting piece looking at the science of creativity, and the blockage that fundamentalist thinking creates.

The human capability for divergent reasoning results in a nearly limitless range of creative outcomes, from entirely personal to world changing. Surely humanity’s earliest innovations were life altering, as were the many that followed. Recall our eventual acceptance (against initially unyielding church doctrine) of Copernicus’s unfathomable idea that the Sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of our solar system, or Einstein’s affront to the known laws of physics with his concept that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. But even more mundane activities, like resolving an unacceptable marital situation by seeking conduct on the part of one of the partners that was previously not considered, discovering a treatment solution for a heretofore incurable disease,creating a work of distinctive art, finding an alternative to war in a tense geopolitical situation, a chef’s creation of a new recipe, carefully arranging flowers in vase, or making up a bedtime story, are examples of creative acts resulting from the ability to diverge from current circumstances and consider or enact new possibilities. Certainly, both convergent and divergent reasoning serve to enhance our well being. But it is an individual’s ability to diverge from what is familiar and move beyond the known into a new understanding which is the essence of creativity, and that which gives rise to advancement. In the words of Frank Zappa, “Without deviation from the norm, ‘progress’ is not possible.” Whether a person chooses to question and think on his or her own or remains unconditionally adherent to religious dogma, might relate to how specific areas of the brain are utilized—or not.

A caseworker with a cult following

• David Montgomery contributes a fascinating profile of a DC-area writer named Mark Opsasnick in The Washington Post.
  

This is what it's all about:

It is as if the prescribed geography of his existence, and the predictability of his routines, set him free. They allow him to plunge deeper into his subjects than anyone else. What he is after is the bedrock, the gritty essence that made a place different from any other place, before the great cultural sameness began settling over the land.

"He is just totally obsessed, as am I, with documenting the denizens, the vibe, the atmosphere," say filmmaker Jeff Krulik, a fellow Prince Georgian who made "Heavy Metal Parking Lot."

"When things get bulldozed, there's a facade job, all of a sudden when things are cleaned up and made to look nice and nobody has the appreciation . . . [he] verifies and validates that it existed."

Friends have watched Opsasnick's metamorphosis into a bard of the obscure with a that's-just-Mark acceptance.

"He likes dates and names and stuff, and he just remembers them," says Julie Ward, a friend who's a licensing management systems analyst at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "Once he gets interested in something, he just goes to town."

Take the amateur men's basketball team he formed in the early 1990s. Characteristically, Opsasnick wasn't content with pickup games in some high school gym. The players were stunned to find themselves going on the road to play Harvard, Providence, Holy Cross, Xavier. "Once he starts digging into something, he goes all the way to the top," says Ken Adrian, who coached the team and now is athletic director at Neuse Baptist Christian School in Raleigh, N.C.

To do this research, he haunts libraries and historical societies, performing such prodigiously tedious feats as reading every edition of the Prince George's Post from 1932 to 1984, and every entertainment section of the Washington Daily News from 1950 to 1971. He chats up old-timers in bars and records hundreds of hours of interviews.

Lately he's been giving bookstore readings, to an audience of nearly 50 in Kensington, more than 100 in Alexandria. He wears a beatnik beret he picked up at that Rehoboth Kmart. Bands play Doors tunes while he signs books.

He has a routine for preparing for the readings. He writes his speech on notecards. Then every evening for a week he walks from his house to the woods by Greenbelt Lake.

There, he stands on a log and lectures to the squirrels about the Lizard King as the sun goes down.

Technicolor dreamers

• A Telegraph article on a Wassily Kandinsky exhibition discusses his synaesthetic touch.

An engaging article on Kandinsky that includes fun footnotes on similarly-gifted writers:

Charles Baudelaire
The influential French poet and chronicler of modern life displayed synaesthetic sensibilities in his 1857 sonnet "Correspondances": "Perfumes, sounds and colours answer each other." In addition to his frequent writings on Richard Wagner's music, Baudelaire was intrigued by sensuous experiences, especially of the body within the city. He also experimented with hashish in order to enhance the intermingling of the senses. Baudelaire's countryman and fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud had synaesthesia, too.

Vladimir Nabokov
The Russian author famed for his English novel of 1955 Lolita, developed his "freakish gift" of synaesthesia during childhood when he complained to his mother that the colours on his wooden alphabet blocks were "all wrong". Synaesthesia is now recognised as a genetically inherited trait, and the Nabokov family was full of synaesthetes; his mother, wife and son Dimitri all had the condition. "The confessions of a synaesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings," wrote Nabokov.

See also: Choosing the right words.

Hearts and minds; Garrison Keillor jumps the shark

• Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan discusses a blogger's plan to get key American works translated for Arabic readers.

A fascinating idea, but not without holes. A professor at the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, according to the story, is raising money to hire translators to translate key works of American political philosophy into Arabic for the Middle-Eastern market:

He has in mind the essays and speeches of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Susan B. Anthony; a solid history of American Jews and other minority groups; maybe a few good books, written by American historians, about Iraq. Cole also wants to subsidize Middle Eastern publishers to print these books in large numbers and at low prices, and he wants to pay fees to book dealers throughout the region—just as publishers pay Borders and Barnes & Noble here—to display the books prominently.

Thankfully, this doesn't smack of a PR or business scam (at least not overtly so), but Kaplan does address its major pitfall:

Will Juan Cole's Library of Americana project do that? By itself, no. At best it's the kind of effort that takes years to germinate. It's aimed more at students and intellectuals than at "the street." Whatever impact it has will be trickle-down, not head-on.

Regardless of your political or religious persuasion, it will still take generations of backbreaking effort to undo the damage that has been wrought in the Middle East by shortsighted American foreign policy. That's just the way people are; it's much harder to change a mind, particularly in an elder generation whose ideals are fixed and solidified. Persistence in getting the meat of the American democratic ideal in front of our adversaries is what could eventually make it work, but it seems that it's difficult, if not impossible, to get the current administration to think beyond the narrow sphere of its own interests:

Long ago, the federal government did on its own just what Cole proposes to do. The United States Information Agency—then an independent agency—maintained libraries in Amman, Istanbul, and elsewhere, filled with translations of American political and literary classics. The Franklin Book Program, a nonprofit company with funding from the State Department and private foundations, published hundreds of titles and stocked them in libraries and bookstores all over the world. The Franklin Book Program shut down in 1977, its international board having determined—prematurely, it turned out—that its mission was accomplished. In the 1990s, under pressure from the Republican-run Senate (especially Jesse Helms, then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee), the USIA was absorbed into the State Department; its budget was whacked and its agenda politicized; its libraries were shut down, their books remaindered.

Fear of new ideas isn't limited to a Republican or even a conservative mentality; it's hardwired into the human brain. Horror stories, for example, revolve exclusively around that principle -- that which is unknown is most terrifying. We've got to get these people to lose their fear of the dark.

• At Salon, Garrison Keillor spews a screed against whiny writers.

Keillor does make some points. There's nothing more insufferable than a writer-type who broods and bitches and never actually does anything. I've done it myself, as many of my roommates and regular readers will happily attest.

But.

Setting aside the question of taste, for which there is no accounting, Keillor shoots himself the foot by filling up the article with mindless, ill-thought-out generalizations, and baldly reveals his own middlebrow sensibilities by proclaiming that:

Young people are pessimistic enough these days without their elders complaining about things. Shut up. Life is pretty good when you grow up. You own your own car, you go where you like, and you sing along with the radio or talk to yourself or chat on your cellphone. You pull into the drive-up window and order the Oreo Blizzard. What's not to like?

What?!?

I'm very glad that writing comes so easily for Keillor, and that he's not forced to work a demeaning, soul-draining nine-to-five day job that leaves scant little time for writing solely for oneself, which is what most writers in the world have to do. There are precious few who can put words to paper every day and not have to do anything else to put food on the table. But it's awfully easy, and foolish, for him to lob stones from his high perch. It's easy to write, sure, especially when you're a millionaire with a handful of published novels and a radio show and a regular gig writing columns for Salon. Yeah, it's a breeze.

Nothing that is worth doing is ever easy. Many good comments on the article can be found at Salon's site, with many of them sounding hosannas in agreement, but many more make other and better points about writing. Some point out that attaining the discipline to actually sit down and do the writing is harder than the writing itself. Others make the point that writing might be easy, but rewriting, finding an agent, finding a publisher, getting books on the shelves and simply reaching readers is where the real hard part lies. Keillor's shockingly myopic essay, then, may be the best writing he's ever done; for the very first time, he may indeed have hit a nerve.

Bad dogs, great works and one brave woman

• Malcolm Gladwell looks at the “pit bull menace” at The New Yorker.

Another excellent piece from Mr. Gladwell, a writer who manages to be consistently insightful and intelligent without condescension or pretense. I’ve not yet read his Blink or The Tipping Point but I’ve been a fan of his New Yorker pieces for years, and a new one is always a high point of the day. Gladwell’s technique is to juxtapose two seemingly incompatible topics -- here, an anti-pit-bull legislation passed in Canada and racial and criminal profiling in New York City -- and hit “puree”. Gladwell asks pointed questions and comes up with equally pointed answers, and never backs down from uncomfortable truths. A very good read, as usual.

• Michael Dirda reviews John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts? at The Washington Post.

An interesting point from Dirda and Carey closes out the piece:

Literature accomplishes so much because it makes us think as well as feel. In his last chapter, Carey proposes that indistinctness -- arising through the use of metaphor and simile -- grants poetry and fiction their particular, elusive richness. We are forced to build up in our minds complicated notions and images: "As the indistinctiveness of a text increases, so the reader's imaginative effort has to intensify." Such effort results in that "personal ownership" of a poem or story that is written art's "unique gift."

I’ve often thought that most of the great works of art tend to have a hole in them, a void where anyone can bring anything they want to the table in terms of interpretation. What separates the wheat from the chaff is the work’s ability to sustain a multitude of interpretations, be it intentional or not. You want your works to have that fluidity, to last, but it only happens some of the time (if you’re lucky enough to have it happen at all).

• As of January 30, freelance reporter Jill Carroll is still alive.

Let's hope this truly brave woman makes it home safely.

A dangerous idea

• Psychologist Howard Gardner posits an interesting answer to The World Question Center’s annual question: “What is your dangerous idea?”

According to myth, Pandora unleashed all evils upon the world; only hope remained inside the box. Hope for human survival and progress rests on two assumptions: (1) Human constructive tendencies can counter human destructive tendencies, and (2) Human beings can act on the basis of long-term considerations, rather than merely short-term needs and desires. My personal optimism, and my years of research on "good work", could not be sustained without these assumptions.

Yet I lay awake at night with the dangerous thought that pessimists may be right. For the first time in history — as far as we know! — we humans live in a world that we could completely destroy. The human destructive tendencies described in the past by Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud, the "realist" picture of human beings embraced more recently by many sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and game theorists might be correct; these tendencies could overwhelm any proclivities toward altruism, protection of the environment, control of weapons of destruction, progress in human relations, or seeking to become good ancestors. As one vivid data point: there are few signs that the unprecedented power possessed by the United States is being harnessed to positive ends.

Strictly speaking, what will happen to the species or the planet is not a question for scientific study or prediction. It is a question of probabilities, based on historical and cultural considerations, as well as our most accurate description of human nature(s). Yet, science (as reflected, for example, in contributions to Edge discussions) has recently invaded this territory with its assertions of a biologically-based human moral sense. Those who assert a human moral sense are wagering that, in the end, human beings will do the right thing. Of course, human beings have the capacities to make moral judgments — that is a mere truism. But my dangerous thought is that this moral sense is up for grabs — that it can be mobilized for destructive ends (one society's terrorist is another society's freedom fighter) or overwhelmed by other senses and other motivations, such as the quest for power, instant gratification, or annihilation of one's enemies.

I will continue to do what I can to encourage good work — in that sense, Pandoran hope remains. But I will not look upon science, technology, or religion to preserve life. Instead, I will follow Albert Camus' injunction, in his portrayal of another mythic figure endlessly attempting to push a rock up a hill: one should imagine Sisyphus happy.

After 2005, the only way to go is up

• Archaeologists have discovered the earliest known form of Mayan writing.

Too bad “the writing is mostly indecipherable.” But it does make you wonder what strange, wonderful combination of circumstances compelled humans to start writing. Some strange new desire to create, to make your mark... that, or to scrawl angrily, “For a good time, stop by Kukulcan’s tent.”

• Chapters from 1970s-era novels are rejected by 21st century publishers.

This is just hilarious:

Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."

Like I always say, the only constant in the world is change, but there’s still no accounting for taste. Book buyers aren’t looking for, you know, writing; they’re looking for a multimillion-dollar cash cow they can turn into a movie, a record album and a theme park.

• Lit-crit is turning to science for new ideas.

An interesting read, from a different perspective. Author Nick Gillespie’s most intriguing point follows:

Both cognitive and evolutionary approaches to lit-crit have been gaining recognition and adherents over the past decade or so. Cognitive critics are less interested in recurring plots or specific themes in literature, but they share with the Darwinists an interest in using scientific advances to help explore the universally observed human tendency toward creative expression, or what the fascinating anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake called in Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, “making special.” This unironic -- though hardly uncritical -- interest in science represents a clear break with much of what might be called the postmodern orthodoxy, which views science less as a pure source of knowledge and more as a means of controlling and regulating discourse and power. The postmodern view has contributed to a keener appreciation of how appeals to science are often self-interested and obfuscating.

Criticism being the exploration of a personal reaction, it follows that the self-examination that it entails would lead some down a more scientific path, ostensibly to find data with the cold hardness of fact to support their own feelings and interpretations. But it figures just as much that those very “facts” are actually quite specious -- any statistician will tell you that you can find any amount of data to “prove” your “theory,” no matter how insane. Simple old willpower can bring any nutty notion to light but the ideas that strike a deeper, more logical and rational chord within us -- theories like evolution, for example -- tend to take on lives of their own, far beyond what their discoverer ever intended or even understood themselves. I remember a bit from Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy where he talked about how a philosopher in ancient Greece -- Anaxagoras, I believe -- came up with a version of heliocentrism, long before 17th-century scientists like Copernicus and Kepler proved it so; the point being, sometimes the answer sits right in front of people for a long time before anyone notices. Lit-crit might come up with some fancy new terms but unless they’re really, really challenging the status quo, it’s just gonna be old wine, new bottle.

Lost in an art, conservative bears, and a very good excuse

• Andre Aciman dissects Proust’s translators at the New York Review of Books.

The difference between the Moncrieff translations of In Search of Lost Time and the new series overseen by Christopher Prendergast are indeed very distinct; Moncrieff tends to tie Proust’s sentences into knots, whereas the James Grieve translation of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, for example, flows silky-smooth. You get the point (and with Proust, there are many worth getting) without having to untangle an overtly-ornamental rendering to do so. Aciman’s article, however, serves the dual function of being at once a perfect example of tunnel-vision typographical nitpicking, and an illustration of the inherent pitfalls of translation, proving again that the process involves its very own prickly form of creativity. It could be that Moncrieff’s original versions better approximates the context from which the work emerged (as Aciman notes, Moncrieff began his work on Swann’s Way just before Proust’s death in 1922), but as language inevitably evolves into different forms it does become necessary to take a fresh look once in a while.

• Stan Berenstain, 1923-2005.

Having grown up in the same region of the world that Berenstain hailed from, his Berenstain Bears series does have a nostalgic appeal to me, but I can’t say I ever saw much correlation between his vision of the world and mine; I just thought that living inside a tree would be pretty neat. Berenstain’s conservative storytelling was less interesting than his art; the books were always fun to look at, anyway. Ironic, then, that Theodore Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, helped get the series started at Random House in his days as an editor. Small world.

And now, an early holiday gift for all frustrated arty types:

• Creativity linked to sexual success.

Old news, really. Just save this article and use it as you might a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Then thump your chest and bellow, "I am all that is man!"

Groupthink, dormroom favorites and that pest Darwin

• Michael Young tackles the problem of public intellectuals at Reason.

Despite the needlessly highfalutin’ sound of the phrase “intellectual power cadre,” there’s still something enormously appealing about the idea of a bunch of brainy maniacs getting together, bouncing ideas around and goading each other into great things. A creative comfort zone that’s generated by your peers is incredibly rewarding; I’ve always found it fascinating to trace friendships and relationships between artists, if only to practice armchair psychology in tracing influences and trends.

Granted, groups like this inevitably burn themselves out, or turn against one another, or simply grow apart. But there’s nothing like watching a group of similarly-minded artists getting together and producing great things because of (or, perhaps, in spite of) their influence on one another.

Another excellent piece in this vein is Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece “Group Think”, which examines the clubhouse atmosphere of Saturday Night Live’s heyday in the context of similar group-driven movements throughout history, and comes up with some interesting points along the way:

We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that's not how it works, whether it's television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book "The Sociology of Philosophies," Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves: the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch'ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another's spouses.

• Famous people talk about books they loved in college at Slate.

So I’m not famous, but anyway, a book I really loved in college was Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s one of those books that’s next to impossible to summarize, because it covers so many different bases; Hofstadter is a lot like Arthur Koestler in his restless examination of practically anything that crosses his radar. Ostensibly it’s about the process of translating a poem by French writer Clement Marot into simple Yankspeak, but Hofstadter spins this narrative thread off into a thousand different directions; even when he’s totally lost you, you still marvel at the sheer wealth of ideas and the associative web that he weaves.

David Fincher once noted that language was invented so that people could lie to one another; Hofstadter’s ebullient examination of art, language and ideas (and, most movingly, love) strikes far deeper than you ever expect it to, and really gives you a reason to believe. Back in my dormroom days, Thoreau’s Walden provided me a few weeks worth of great head-in-the-clouds idealism, but Le Ton beau de Marot is the one I still find myself sneaking back to.

• D. T. Max places Austen and Darwin in the same sphere at the New York Times Magazine.

Science and art would seem to be strange bedfellows and yet the great artists -- the ones whose work endures -- set out to capture nature’s patterns in their work, most particularly our own. A comment from Christopher Hitchens in the aforementioned Slate piece, regarding George Eliot’s talent “in guessing at the real springs of human motive and in describing the mammalian underlay of social forces,” ties in nicely with this piece, which examines Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the context of evolutionary behavior.

Yeah, it’s probably because there’s a new movie of it out, but still, there are plenty of interesting bits along the way:

It is useful to know a bit about current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at a text as the product of particular social conditions or, less often, as a network of references to other texts. (Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, famously observed that there was "nothing outside the text.") It often focuses on how the writer's and the reader's identities - straight, gay, female, male, black, white, colonizer or colonized - shape a particular narrative or its interpretation. Theorists sometimes regard science as simply another form of language or suspect that when scientists claim to speak for nature, they are disguising their own assertion of power. Literary Darwinism breaks with these tendencies. First, its goal is to study literature through biology - not politics or semiotics. Second, it takes as a given not that literature possesses its own truth or many truths but that it derives its truth from laws of nature.

Just let it ring

• Neely Tucker digs up some gems on Bill Watterson at the Washington Post.

Half a warm appreciation of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, the other half shedding a little more light on its reclusive creator. Best bit: Watterson refusing to take a call from Steven Spielberg.

• Karl Ritter recaps the recent brouhaha over the Nobel Prize on the Associated Press newswire.
  

So Knut Ahnlund doesn't particularly care for Elfriede Jelinek's work. Fine. But ask yourself, now: what's the point of the Nobel Prize in the first place? Like any award, it's just an invitation to a club. Clubs belong in junior high school and awards don't change a damn thing.

• Old news: "Sleeping on it" works. (from 2004)

I suppose it never hurts to be reminded of this. Once you hit the wall, you can either sit there and cry about it or just come back to it later. I suggest the latter.

New ideas, and the science of art

• The literary magazine n+1 bemoans the “exteriorizing of literature” (uncredited author).

An interesting discussion on the importance of solitude of vision. When writing (in any form) gets homogenized, stagnation is sure to follow, and we’ll be forced to (gasp!) develop some new ideas. The obvious problem that comes along when you’re writing something with the sole intent of making money is that by the time you’re finished with your sure-fire cash cow, the market (i.e., the prevailing taste of the public) has probably moved on to the Next Big Thing. You’re better off just writing for yourself.

• Rebecca Saxe delivers a discourse on moral reasoning at The Boston Review.

Studying psychology provides great lessons on how to build interesting characters. Saxe’s piece introduces an interesting moral dilemma at the outset and examines its complexities; on the whole, however, the essay does beg the question, exactly how much can science explain human nature before it starts chasing its own tail? Still, the ability to create morally complex dramatic dilemmas is a storyteller’s greatest gift, and this piece is a good reference point in that regard.

• Sharon Begley examines the fine line between creativity and madness at In Character.

Personally, I think we’re all fucked up somehow, so this is kind of old news; yet the topic still has a tide-current pull to it. Creativity is not limited to the arts (never has been; never will be) and yet the prevalent stereotype of the artist is that they’re all nuts. You see the mad-scientist syndrome in cooks, cab drivers, engineers, firefighters, et cetera; the impulse to employ an innovative solution to a problem will always be found wherever there’s a pulse. It’s what you do with that impulse that makes you great.